


you've been on my mind girl since the flood

by lulla_lunekjaer



Series: else writes soulmate aus [1]
Category: The Ever Afters Series - Shelby Bach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Contrived Plot Devices, F/M, Malaysian!Chatty, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Theatre Nerd!Ben, i wrote this instead of doing homework instead of sleeping, idk what else is there to say, pretentiousness on the behalf of the author, that's basically canon now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-08 01:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13447518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: Benvolio Taylor had no problem with the concept of soulmates. He did not even, in fact, have a problem with having one. To be sure, he had never met them, but he was sure it would work out. They were, after all, soulmates. They were destined to, at some point in their lives, meet and fall in love. Ben was glad he hadn’t met his soulmate yet, although he hoped it wouldn’t be too long. The messiest cases were when people met as babies or young children and couldn’t remember the first words they said to each other. No, Ben only had one problem with his soulmate's first words to him, seemingly tattooed on his wrist.He couldn’t read them.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Ophelia" by the Lumineers  
> no it's not just because I saw Hamlet this weekend  
> she saves Ben from drowning, and also he thinks about her in a vague sense a lot so there
> 
> also STC's Hamlet was amazing
> 
> and there was waaayyyyy too much random research involved in this fic w o w why can't I be like this for things I actually have to work on

Benvolio Taylor had no problem with the concept of soulmates. He did not even, in fact, have a problem with having one. To be sure, he had never met them, but he was sure it would work out. They were, after all, soulmates. They were destined to, at some point in their lives, meet and fall in love. Ben was glad he hadn’t met his soulmate yet, although he hoped it wouldn’t be too long. The messiest cases were when people met as babies or young children and couldn’t remember the first words they said to each other. No, Ben only had one problem with his soulmate's first words to him, seemingly tattooed on his wrist.

He couldn’t read them.

Google Translate recognized them as Arabic but spit out an unintelligible mess of English letters. Ben’s teacher, who had at one point lived in a place that had more than 2,000 people, said she thought it might be a dialect, but she had taken French Canadian instead of continuing Arabic under the impression that it would be more useful in her life. She would go on to find her soulmate at the age on 32 while on vacation in Montreal. The short curator with the glasses and adorably curly hair that she stopped in the hallway between exhibits had the words, “excusez-moi, mais . . .” scrawled on her wrist in the teacher’s cramped handwriting. But this is not her story, so let us return to Ben - 

Since there was nothing that could be done about it, he decided to ignore the words as best he could and focus on getting good grades so that he could leave rural Minnesota and go find his soulmate, whoever they were, all the sooner. There was something of an inevitability about it, knowing that someday he would have to go find them - that idea that they would make it to him first, when they were so obviously foreign, so different, so  _ other  _ when compared to his community of farmers and the three roads that were everything that wasn’t a farm,  was, to seventeen-year-old Ben, incomprehensible. 

His mother, widowed when Ben was six years old, had kept running the tiny post office/bookstore/candy shop that Ben’s father’s family had run since the town was founded in the 1800s. She always said that they were going to move back south to Minneapolis, where she was from, or Chicago, where she had met Ben’s father by saying “Actually, if you consider that a tangent function is essentially a sine over a cosign - oh” in their shared math class. It was the fifth class of the semester, and he sat behind her and asked his friend a lot of questions that neither of them knew the answer to, but she did, and they wouldn’t just ask the professor, so she turned around and told them. That was the first part. The “oh” was because Ben’s father had happened to raise his arm to adjust his glasses at the moment when she turned around and she had seen her thoughts catch up with the words that had been written on him since birth, words that very clearly ended with “oh.”

“Eloquent,” said Ben’s father’s friend, who had realized what had just happened and was amused by it.

“I certainly think so,” said Ben’s father, looking straight at her. 

At the moment that Ben was thinking, even though he had told himself that he wouldn’t, about driving his truck out of town and out of Minnesota and all the way to somewhere with a large population where he would find his soulmate, the words “I certainly think so” on his mother’s arm were covered in flour, a side effect of kneading bread. They had not grown fainter in the years following his father’s death, but stronger, darker, as if they knew how much his mother missed him. 

But we forget, sometimes, that this is not only Ben’s story. It is also Sherah’s, and at that same moment when Ben was thinking about her in the vague sense that bored teenagers who have never read the play think about  _ Romeo and Juliet _ , dramatically and romantically, without thought to just how many deaths were caused by the ignorance of adults when it came to their children, which is to say, idealistically, Sherah binti Ajis was stepping off an airplane for the sixth time in her life. 

It was also the third time she’d been taken aside for extra searches before boarding. She had had to get a connecting flight in Sacramento and they had made her go through security again. Sherah wondered how many times women wearing crosses were told to step aside, ma’am. She reached up and readjusted her hijab self-consciously. The Minneapolis airport, while not the largest she had ever been in, has still pretty large, and she wasn’t looking forward to crossing it to reach the baggage claim, where her aunt had told her she would be waiting. She was to spend the summer with her, refining her English before heading to Yale. She thought her English was just fine, thank you - after all, who had written the killer essay that had gotten her a full ride to Yale, anyway? 

Her aunt, who had moved to America with her husband twenty years before, and thus was meeting Sherah for the first time at the baggage claim, was all too aware of how her status had changed in airports since 2001. Despite this, she loved them. She had met her husband, her soulmate, in an airport. She had been a flight attendant just getting off work when he stopped her to ask for directions in broken Malay. Her terse “I speak English, you know” failed to redden his dark cheeks, but he looked properly ashamed until he pulled up his sleeve to reveal the same words marked there in startling bright white contrast. Her family had showed some resistance, but even if he was African, at least he was Muslim, and really, they were soulmates. Sherah’s aunt was known within her family to be formidable, and she would have found some way or another to be with him.

Three days after arriving in Minneapolis, by which time Sherah was well and truly bored with her aunt’s house and just wanted to go to Mall of America, Ben’s grandfather died. Ben had never really known him, only having gone to see him for a week or two at a time each summer, but he was his mother’s father, and she hadn’t seen him for three years, citing a need to stay and keep the post office/bookstore/candy shop open. Never mind that most of the residents had keys to their boxes and to the door anyway, or that any one of their neighbors could have watched it for them. 

In reality, it was about Ben’s grandfather commenting on the state of Ben’s clothes the last time she had visited. Ever since then, she had always made sure he had new clothes before he went down, even if they were seersucker. 

The clothes they bought for the funeral were decidedly not seersucker. They were black, and bought halfway through the eight hour drive, and it was too hot. 

The funeral was in a church. Ben hadn’t been to church in a year, not since his grandfather had taken him.

He had been, in life, a devout Lutheran, and no doubt continued to be one even after death. The words inscribed on his wrist were “It’s very nice to meet you” in Ben’s grandmother’s perfect script. In his time, this phrase and his response, “Likewise,” had been very common, but he still said he’d known from the very moment he laid eyes on her at a picnic. 

He was then interred in the same graveyard as Ben’s grandmother - a lifelong agostic who had attended church with him every Sunday until she died all the same, “just in case,” when really, it was for him. 

“Dearly beloved,” said the pastor (“yup, we exist”), whose husband (“I didn’t know that we ordained gay people now”) was at home, making a quiche to cheer him up after the service. The words reminded Ben of La Vie Boheme, and then of a book he had read in school. Either way, it made him sad. Not distraught, not overcome, not drowning in emotion, but just sad. In some ways, he had known those characters better than he had known his grandfather. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Ben’s mother was very sure how she felt about not sleeping in a dead man’s bed, however, so they booked a hotel room. 

“If we don’t splurge once in a while, on the things that matter,” she had said, “I don’t think we’re really living.” 

Ben wasn’t so sure.

He also, with the stupid curiosity and morbid fascination of a teenage boy, wondered what would happen if he slept in his dead grandfather’s bed. 

Sherah, meanwhile, had talked her cousin into taking her to Mall of America, ostentatiously to buy warmer clothes. It wasn’t that much colder than at home, but an excuse was an excuse and she wanted to go to the Lego store. 

Ben, coincidentally, in that way that the universe arranges coincidences for us, was also at the Lego store in the Mall of America that day. His mother had dropped him off there while dealing with some paperwork as quickly as she could in the hopes that they would be able to get back home before dark that night. 

He didn’t notice Sherah inspecting the anatomy of the tiger made of Legos - Sadly lacking, she thought - as he was busy looking at the Lord of the Rings sets. He took out his wallet to see how much he had, and if it was enough (it wasn’t, and besides, he needed the money to buy books for school, anyway), and that was when the universe struck, in the grand coincidental fashion that it sometimes likes to strike in. 

Readers should take note that the universe does this very rarely, as in the aforementioned case of Romeo and Juliet, her only love was sprung from her only hate, a set of couplets on each of their wrists, dancing at a party neither of them felt they should attend. 

Sometimes the universe is poetic like that.

Sometimes it is simply touching another person’s hand and feeling known. 

Sometimes it is hearing the words you know as well as the back of your hand, or, rather, your wrist, and smiling, because you know that you are found.

But, then again, sometimes it’s checking how much money you have and not quite closing your wallet right and then your learner’s permit (not your license, because you’re waiting until you’re eighteen so the court hands it directly over to you and not your mother, and also because you’re bi and therefore choosing to say that you’re gay and can’t drive, which, while not entirely accurate on behalf of your being bi, also has no scientific basis, but you’re going to keep using it as an excuse anyway because it makes you feel better) falls out and you don’t notice and leave because you have decided that looking at Legos when you can’t buy them is depressing.

And then your learner’s permit is picked up by a girl in a hijab the color of the sea.


	2. Chapter 2

As the ensuing argument between Sherah, her aunt, and her cousin was very long and very boring, we have elected not to share it. It also involved many practicalities on behalf of Sherah’s aunt and many more pretentious talk of coincidence and soulmates on behalf of Sherah’s cousin, much like has been detailed above. 

Sherah only knew, whether it was the call of fate, or the universe, or her soulmate whose mysterious first words, in English no less, graced her wrist, or just her boredom, that someway or another, she was going to find Benvolio Taylor and return his learner’s permit. 

“It’s like a quest,” Ben might have said, had he been the one to find Sherah’s learner’s permit, or rather, her passport, which was the singular form of identification she had on her in the United States, and which would have been rather useless in finding her, since it had her home address, where she lived, and which was in Malaysia, and not her aunt’s address, which was where she was staying, in a suburb of Minneapolis. “Return the lost object to fair maiden.” If he had found her passport and looked at the picture he would have known that she was in no way fair, especially compared to Ben’s own rather pasty complexion. You can’t tell whether or not someone is a virgin from their passport, nor their learner’s permit, so Ben would have had no way of knowing that, either. Ben had a tendency to be overdramatic, possibly due to the inherent tendencies of having his name, and of having parents that would name their child that.

“It’s from Shakespeare, you know,” said her cousin, who actually had a driver’s license, unlike both Sherah and Ben. “Benvolio. He’s Romeo’s cousin in Romeo and Juliet, he’s one of the few characters that actually survives the play.”

“I know,” said Sherah, who did, in fact, know. 

“I wonder what his parents were thinking,” said her cousin.

It may please you to know that at that moment, Ben’s mother was thinking about him. Well, she was thinking about his father, and how young he had died, and how much of a bitch life was. She was thinking about how he had known about his heart, how the doctor had told him to take it easy, but he had kept working because she was pregnant and hadn’t told her until after Ben was born. How she had yelled at him about it. How they had been cooking dinner one night, years later, and then he had - stopped. How the words had gotten darker, more distinct. How she had researched it and found an article about a woman who, when her soulmate died, had tried to slit her wrist, right across the words. The woman had survived, but the words were wrecked beyond repair by the stitches. Ben’s mother couldn’t imagine it. 

She thought about how she had gone from wearing her watch on her right wrist to her left, to cover up the words. How she could only bear not seeing them for a day. 

And then she thought about Ben. How he was getting older, how his soulmate would someday find him, and how much pain one of them was going to go through someday, but so much joy, too. 

Ben was, at that moment, thinking about buying a truck. He thought that he would end up bringing his soulmate back here and they would look after the post office/bookstore/candy shop, just like his parents. He thought a truck would be useful, and he liked the way they looked. Something in a bright color, he thought. Red, or green, maybe. Not silver. 

If Sherah had known what Ben was thinking at that moment, she would’ve thought,  _ good. It’s good for him to be a child and think about frivolous things. _

If Ben had known just how bored Sherah was at that moment, despite having wanted to go so badly in order to decrease her boredom and not realizing just how boring driving through Minnesota was, he would have thought,  _ sorry that it’s so boring here. I wanted to come find you first, which would have spared you the trouble, but sometimes life doesn’t work out how you want it to. _

If Sherah’s cousin had known what either of them were thinking, they would have found it very distracting and would have pulled off the next time they saw a McDonalds to treat themself. 

The joke would’ve been on them, however, as they had passed the last McDonalds between Minneapolis and the home of Benvolio Taylor about thirty miles ago.

When they arrived at the post office/bookstore/candy store, hours later, however, it was closed, as Ben and his mother were at the (tiny, barely large enough to be called a) grocery store. 

“Shit,” said her cousin. “What do we do now?” 

“We wait,” said Sherah.

It was while waiting that she realized what a very obviously Muslim hijabi girl sitting in a car in a very obviously white small town where everyone knew everyone else looked like. She could feel them staring, the people on the street. 

“Maybe this was a bad idea,” she said to her cousin in Malay. “Maybe he’s not even here. Maybe he’s still in Minneapolis and we came all this way for nothing.”  _ What could happen to Muslim girls in small towns like this _ , she thought,  _ is the stuff of my nightmares. _

“This was your idea,” her cousin said.

It may humor you to know that at that moment, Ben was considering a similar conversation that might occur between him and his mother if they bought ice cream.

_ “This is delicious,” he would say. “But I am so, so, so, so full,” punctuating each “so” with a pounding of his fist on the coffee table. _

_ “This was your idea,” his mother would say, similarly disinterested in eating, ever, for the rest of her life. _

He smiled and put the ice cream in the basket.

The fact that it was sea salt caramel is one of those little details that some people like to call fate, or destiny, or the universe’s grand coincidences, but are most likely the result of a limited number of ice cream flavors and seven billion people. 

Whichever it was, it also happened to be Sherah’s favorite flavor. 

While this significance was completely lost on Ben, we hope that it will not be on you, the reader.

Upon leaving the store, paper bags in arm, he walked home, following a couple of paces behind his mother, who had only one bag, because she needed to have a free arm to open the door. There was a car parked outside, and the two people inside it seemed to be arguing. Ben shrugged and took the groceries inside.

Sherah, meanwhile, had gasped and clutched at her cousin. “I think it’s him!” she said.

Her cousin, by this time very hungry and tired and not at all sympathetic to Sherah’s plight, gave her the side-eye. Had they thought about it, they might have come to the conclusion that the universe was doing its weird soulmate attraction thing and humored her a bit more. 

They were not very attracted to the idea of soulmates in general, as the whole thing seemed to them very silly, one person might say something to people all the time everywhere and it would be but someday, they would run into a girl, literally, on a college campus and she would say “sorry” and they would say “it’s okay” and they would forget about it, because so many instances are just that and it’s not really your soulmate, but when they thought about it, years later, they would hold hands across the table, and decide that yes, they were soulmates, that that had been it. 

For then, though, they would later agree that they had been somewhat of a brat. 

Not that that mattered, because in the grand scheme of things, Ben Taylor heard the people in the car outside yelling and thought maybe he should go ask them if they needed help.

“Just go inside! You know he’s there, give him the stupid card and we can go!” they said, waving their arms about. 

“Then what?” Sherah shouted back, in Malay, just in case he could hear them. “This was a stupid idea, and maybe I should just put it in the mailbox or something, and it’s late, and we’ve been driving so long, and this town is too small to even have somewhere to stay the night, and I don’t know what we’re going to do, and what do YOU want?” This last was directed at the boy who stood posed with his fist just about to knock on her cousin’s window. He looked stunned, and she realized that he most likely only spoke English, and definitely not Malay. 

“What do you want,” she spat at him, this time in English. 

“I came to see if you were okay, but I can go . . .” he said. 

It seemed to Sherah to be so understated. The realization. Looking back on it, she thought she must’ve been in a state of shock. That was it. Those were her words, were his words, which meant that she must already be on his wrist, unless he wasn’t her match, which was rare but not impossible, or something was wrong and suddenly she had to see his wrist. She had to know. Why was he not freaking out? She was freaking out.

Ben was not freaking out because he hadn’t yet realized what had just happened. He was too focused on the girl in the green hijab, who he had just realised was possibly the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life. She looked angry at his presence, but then something seemed to change and she looked shaken.

He would know why soon enough, but for all intents and purposes, despite having an exemplary academic record, Ben Taylor was not exactly the smartest person in the world, which is to say that although he had some common sense and plenty of knowledge, he was not the best at putting two and two together. Right now he was coming up with three. 

“Are you Benvolio Taylor?” she asked, looking for something in her bag, which was shaped like a seashell.

“Yeah,” he answered apprehensively, “why?”

“I think this is yours,” she said, rolling down her window. He stepped up to it and she held out a card. He reached to take it, and his wrist with the words on it was exposed enough to show the curl of a non-Roman script.

Sherah grabbed it, craning her head to try to read it. Ben was very confused, but she was very pretty, and there was really only one reason to try to see another person’s words. Three and a half. 

“It’s Jawi,” she said in surprise. “Fuck, it’s right there. It’s right there. I don’t believe this. It’s actually-”

“Wait,” said Ben, stumbling a little because Sherah was still holding his arm inside the car. “Are we-” Three point seven five.

Sherah yanked up her sleeve on the arm that wasn’t holding Ben’s, exposing her wrist and the words “I came to see if you were okay.”

“Oh my god,” said Ben. Four. “We’re soulmates.”

They would have to deal with the repercussions of that, and Ben’s mother coming outside to see what was taking him so long and crying and letting them stay the night, and Sherah’s cousin calling Sherah’s aunt to tell her what they were doing and Sherah’s aunt and Ben’s mom having a very long conversation over the phone about it (“I’m just so happy for him, she seems so wonderful” “She’s not even my daughter and I’m happy for him!”), and Sherah and Ben exchanging phone numbers, and then Sherah goes home, or back to Minneapolis, and they talk on the phone for hours (“You’re really chatty, you know that?” “Yeah?” “Maybe I’ll start calling you that. Chatty.” “See if I answer,” she laughs), and then she goes to Yale to study marine biology and he finds her after class one day (“Why didn’t you tell me we were going to the same school, you idiot?” “I wanted to surprise you!” and “Drama, really?” “Just like Meryl Streep!”), and they have so, so much life to live ahead of them, but for now, they are two teenagers looking into each other’s eyes, holding hands through a rolled-down car window, and each wondering what it is that will happen, knowing that they will have the other with them. That’s how soulmates work, after all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the #everyonelovessherah club
> 
> the McDonalds thing is something that happened to me and my grandmother when I was like 11 while driving between minneapolis and bemidji. she kept saying we would stop at the next town and get lunch but then she said okay we're stopping here and there was NOTHING. not even a grocery store. so we kept going and by the time we actually got anywhere the only thing there was a McDonalds and it was 5pm and I was So Hungry and didn't know what the waitress meant by "pop" (she meant soda, but I am an East Coast child and had No Clue) 
> 
> Also I wanted Ben to give her the nickname Chatty as his first words to her but I couldn't figure out how to work it in without being insensitive since I also really wanted her first words to him to be in Malay. So it goes in the weird bit instead.
> 
> Meryl Streep got a MFA from Yale in 1975.

**Author's Note:**

> idk where Ben lives okay but it's an au and I know about Minnesota so
> 
> can you tell I've had my learner's permit for two years and still don't know how to drive
> 
> I also know next to nothing about Malaysia so please correct me if something's wrong


End file.
